Two Hearts Are Better Than One

There is absolutely no snark to be found in the story of how decorated Korean War veteran and former Representative Pete McCloskey gave one of his Purple Hearts to current congresscritter Jackie Speier, who, in 1978, when she was a 28-year old congressional aide, was wounded gravely five times when the members of the Rev. Jim Jones's People Temple opened fire on a congressional delegation at Port Kaituma airport in Guyana, killing Speier's boss, Congressman Leo Ryan, and four other people.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

"She earned it," McCloskey said recently from his farm in Northern California, where he tends citrus and olive trees. "She got hurt worse than I did."

If you really want to know how far from sanity the Republican party has wandered, consider that it is designed deliberately not to produce another Pete McCloskey, a man who saw the rising dementia as far back as its earliest foul stirrings under Richard Nixon, and in the cynical attempt to use the failure of the American adventure in Vietnam for domestic political advantage, to poison American politics, so that the divisions caused in the country by that misbegotten war would far outlast the war itself. This drove Nixon bughouse, admittedly not a great distance. Pete McCloskey ran against Nixon in 1972—- Doonesbury memorably enlisted Zonker's mother as a plucky McCloskey delegate at the Republican convention that year — because he saw what would be coming down the road if the country empowered that vicious sack of ancient sins. Needless to say, he was right, and he also became one of the first Republicans to call for Nixon's impeachment.

Come to think of it. The Democrats don't produce many like him any more, either.